Infinite

The novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace has been found dead, at the age of forty-six; the cause of death is believed to be suicide. In his work—often comic, ever cerebral—Wallace long rattled the cage of language. His 2002 short story “Good Old Neon” takes the perspective of a man who has killed himself, and who, speaking from the grave, casts death as a kind of liberation:

Think for a second—what if all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward, after what you think of as you has died, because what if afterward now each moment itself is an infinite sea or span or passage of time in which to express it or convey it, and you don’t even need any organized English, you can as they say open the door and be in anyone else’s room in all your own multiform forms and ideas and facets?

Several of his short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, including “Good People,” published last year.

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